Juno Position & Status

View of Juno’s position on May 10 from NASA's Eyes on the Solar System.

As
of May 10, Juno was approximately 50 million miles (80 million kilometers) from
Earth. The one-way radio signal travel time between Earth and Juno is currently
about 4.5 minutes. Juno is currently traveling at a velocity of about 16 miles
(25 kilometers) per second relative to the sun, and increasing. Velocity
relative to Earth is about 4.7 miles (7.6 kilometers) per second. Juno has now
traveled 722 million miles (1.2 billion kilometers) since launch.

The spacecraft is in excellent health and is operating nominally. Four instruments -- JEDI, MWR, Waves, and MAG -- are turned on.

Juno’s
mission ops team performed a flush of the spacecraft’s main engine on May 1,
firing the engine for a couple of seconds. The team does this maintenance
activity about once per year to flush contaminants from the propellant lines
that feed the main engine.

Available
power to Juno’s solar arrays continues to increase as the spacecraft heads
closer to the sun on approach to its Earth flyby gravity assist maneuver on
Oct. 9. Juno is now approximately 1.45 AU from the sun (i.e., inside the orbit
of Mars), after having reached a maximum distance from the sun of 210 million
miles (338 million kilometers, or 2.3 AU) in Sept. 2012. The spacecraft reaches
perihelion, the closest point to the sun in its orbit, in August 2013. An AU,
or astronomical unit, is a convenient measure of distance between places in the
solar system. It is equal to the distance from the Sun to Earth (93 million
miles or 150 million kilometers).